Online influencer Katie Sturino wrote “Sunny Side Up” to highlight a fictional successful plus-size protagonist. The Whitefish Bay native and current New Yorker is well known for her social media accounts that preach the importance of having a positive body image.
Wisconsin landscape | Photo by Greg Conniff for Wisconsin Examiner
President Donald Trump’s tariffs are becoming a major drain on Wisconsin’s agricultural economy. China stopped purchasing U.S. soybeans amid a new trade war this spring, triggering a price collapse and leaving farmers wondering what to do with the bumper crop they are now harvesting. Cranberry growers say they’re facing low prices and market uncertainty, too, as other countries turn away their products because of tariffs.
Small wonder the latest ag economy barometer published by Purdue University on Oct. 7 found that nationwide farmers say their economic condition is weakening. Despite expected record-high corn and soybean yields, farmers report they expect weaker financial performance in 2025 than in 2024 and have a weaker capital investment outlook.
Yet even as optimism about the farm economy is fading, support for Trump among farmers remains strong.
Back in March, 70% of farmers who answered the Purdue survey said they believed tariffs would strengthen the agricultural economy in the long run. That number dropped steeply to 51% by September. Still a large majority — 71% – continue to believe the country as a whole is moving in the right direction, and 80% believe the Trump administration is likely or very likely to give them an aid package to compensate for the damage done by tariffs and trade wars.
U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wisconsin) reinforced this hope on the WRDN radio podcast from the World Dairy Expo in Madison last week. Tiffany, who is running for governor, was asked what he says to farmers who are “fed up” with Trump’s tariffs. He replied that Trump tariffs are not going away, but, he said of the administration, “they’re gonna use some of that tariff revenue, which is significant, to help farmers out. Because they know, I mean, President Trump has no better friends than the farmers of America.”
Trump has suggested he will unveil another farm bailout as he did during his first administration, when China responded to steep tariffs by scaling back purchases of U.S. agricultural products.
The problem with the bailout solution, says Gbenga Ajilore, chief economist at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and former senior adviser for rural development at USDA, is that the revenue generated by tariffs that Trump proposes to convert into handouts to farmers comes directly from the farmers themselves.
“It’s not even like robbing Peter to pay Paul. It’s like robbing Peter to pay Peter,” Ajilore said in a phone interview Wednesday. “What’s happening is that there are tariffs on a lot of goods — looking at steel, aluminum, looking at fertilizers. So farmers are paying more for their inputs. We’re seeing this impacting these companies like Caterpillar, John Deere. And so you can say there’s a lot of revenue, but it’s coming out of the pockets of consumers, businesses and farmers.”
If farmers are not already feeling seasick as the Trump administration spins the ag economy around on a cycle of tariffs and bailouts, the administration’s immigration crackdown is also making them queasy.
A panel discussion at last week’s World Dairy Expo focused on a labor shortage made worse by a Trump administration that seems hell-bent on deporting the agricultural workforce.
Rocks are heavy. Trees are made of wood. Gravity is real. If we deport every single person that is working in the agriculture industry, the hospitality industry and the construction industry, all of those industries will shutter in a moment's notice.
– U.S. Rep Derrick Van Orden
The recent ICE action that scooped up 24 dairy workers in Manitowoc, most of whom had no criminal records, and deportations of entire crews of legally present H2A workers in Texas had farmers who attended the discussion worried.
“Taking hard-working employees off farms does not make communities safer,” said Brain Rexing, a dairy farmer from Indiana. He described the Hispanic workers on his farm as “way more than employees. — they work together with me and my family side to side.”
Like other farmers, he said, he goes to bed at night worrying about his workers and wakes up in the morning worrying about them. Instead of threatening farmworkers with deportation, Rexing and other farmers at the Expo said, Congress should finally get around to creating a year-round visa that recognizes their essential contributions to the U.S. economy.
U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wisconsin) spoke to the group and assured them that the Trump administration has their back. He had personally spoken with Elon Musk he said. “I was like, hey, Elon, there’s two groups of people in the United States that we need to really watch out for. One of them are service members and veterans, because they gave us our freedom and keep us free. And the second one are our farmers, because they feed us. .. So he really zoned in on that and grasped it,” Van Orden said.
Another “incredibly, incredibly strong proponent of the dairy industry,” he added, “is Tom Homan.” Homan is Trump’s border czar and the architect of the family separation policy during the first Trump administration. “He was raised on a dairy farm,” Van Orden said. “So keep that in mind. There are some people in D.C. that understand what’s going on. We’re trying our best to help you. So I would just ask that you stay in the business and that God will bless you.”
It was not the most reassuring speech. But Van Orden also asked the dairy farmers in the room to support his proposal for a new system to make their workforce legal, which would impose a fine on employers and dairy workers and then require the workers to self-deport before returning to the country under a new federal program that would allow them to do their jobs legally. He introduced the bill in July and it was referred to the House Agriculture Committee, of which he is a member.
The farmers, understandably, had a lot of questions.
What was their workers’ incentive to participate? How long would it take the government to process their paperwork, remove them from the country and let them back in again? How do they know they won’t be deported as soon as they come back?
These are reasonable fears, given the terrifying scenes of ICE grabbing people off the street, busting down doors and zip-tying parents and children, sweeping up people with and without legal authorization to be in the country, whether or not they have committed any crime.
Recently, even the Trump administration’s Labor Department declared that the nation’s food system faces an emergency due to the administration’s aggressive mass deportation program, warning in a federal filing uncovered by the American Prospect that the immigration crackdown on agricultural workers has created a significant “risk of supply shock-induced food shortages.”
“The Department does not believe American workers currently unemployed or marginally employed will make themselves readily available in sufficient numbers to replace large numbers of aliens,” the filing states, contradicting Trump administration rhetoric about immigrants stealing American jobs.
Farmers are getting it in so many ways; their exports are down, their costs are up, and they’re losing their workforce.
– Gbenga Ajilore, former USDA economist
The solution proposed by Trump’s labor department is to pay H2A seasonal agricultural workers even less — offsetting the cost to employers of a terrified workforce that is disinclined to show up to work after ICE raids.
It seems like a weird solution, as David Dayen of the American Prospect observed, “since cutting wages across the sector will likely drive existing workers to look elsewhere for jobs.”
But there is a dark logic behind the move to slash wages for agricultural workers in the midst of the moral panic over immigration. Dayen quotes Antonio De Loera-Brust of the United Farm Workers, who sees a government threatening mass deportations working hand in glove with employers who benefit from a powerless immigrant workforce.
“We call it the ‘Deport and Replace’ strategy,” De Loera-Brust said, “which is defined above all to make it easier for corporate agribusiness to exploit its workers, whether terrified undocumented residents or an unlimited pool of cheap foreign guest workers … The Trump administration would rather expand the abusive H-2A program than do right by the workers who are already here, feeding America for decades.”
This situation does not directly apply to Wisconsin dairy farms, since dairy workers are not eligible for H2A visas. But it was not at all clear from Van Orden’s remarks at the World Dairy Expo that he understands that fact.
“The H2A program is broken and it sucks. There you go. That’s the whole press conference,” he said after he was introduced. Later, he referred to “all this garbage you’ve been dealing with, these H2As and H2Bs” insisting his own proposal for a new visa system would work better. In fact, dairy farmers are not dealing with the H2A (seasonal) or H2B (non-agricultural) visa systems at all.
Van Orden did acknowledge the difficult situation for the dairy industry, which depends on a labor force 60% to 90% of which is made up of immigrants who lack any sort of legal authorization to be in the country, since there is no such thing as a year-round visa for low-skilled work.
“Rocks are heavy. Trees are made of wood. Gravity is real. If we deport every single person that is working in the agriculture industry, the hospitality industry and the construction industry, all of those industries will shutter in a moment’s notice,” Van Orden declared.
One farmer asked if his workers would be barred from returning to the U.S. if they committed a traffic violation (a common concern in Wisconsin, where immigrants without legal papers cannot get a driver’s license). Van Orden fobbed him off, saying that would be a question for the executive branch to resolve through its rule-making process.
Several farmers listening to Van Orden affirmed that they supported Trump’s goal of securing the border, but added that they thought that mission had been accomplished. Now they hoped the administration would turn its attention to a new public safety issue — the threat mass deportations pose to the U.S. food supply.
Farmers across the country seem inclined to give the Trump administration the benefit of the doubt. But the doubt is growing.
“Farmers are getting it in so many ways; their exports are down, their costs are up, and they’re losing their workforce,” said Ajilore, the former USDA economist. Given all that, farmer sentiment “actually hasn’t really moved as much as you would expect, given what’s happening,” he said. He attributes it to a wait-and-see attitude among farmers who have faithfully supported Trump for years. But now, he added, “the impact is starting to really hit home.”
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A PFAS advisory sign along Starkweather Creek. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)
More than two years after $125 million was set aside in the 2023-25 state budget to fund the remediation of PFAS contamination across Wisconsin, legislators are again trying to pass two bills to get that money out the door.
At a Senate public hearing Tuesday, the bills’ Republican authors said they’re “all ears” for reaching a compromise on final language. However in the last legislative session, initial hopes that a deal could be reached went unfulfilled after Republicans, Democrats, business groups and environmental organizations dug into their positions and the bill was ultimately vetoed by Gov. Tony Evers.
As was the case in the last effort, the dispute is over who and how the state will hold entities responsible for PFAS contamination.
PFAS are a class of man-made chemical compounds commonly known as “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down easily in the environment. The chemicals, which were used for decades in goods such as non-stick pans, fast food wrappers and firefighting foams, have been connected to causing cancer, thyroid diseases and developmental problems. CommunitiesacrossWisconsinhavefoundPFAScontamination in their water supplies.
Sen. Eric Wimberger (R-Oconto), one of the bills’ co-authors, said at the Tuesday hearing he’s trying to make sure people don’t have to choose between “their health and financial ruin” by testing for contamination and potentially being held responsible for paying for the clean up under the state’s spills law — which allows the Department of Natural Resources to force “responsible parties” to pay for the testing and remediation of chemical contamination.
“We are transitioning from a medical and legal paradigm where a widely used substance was not considered hazardous, to a paradigm where it is considered hazardous, it’s imperative we don’t sweep up those who are not responsible and treat them as though they are,” he said.
Wimberger and Rep. Jeff Mursau (R-Crivitz) have proposed Senate Bills 127 and 128, which establish the exemptions under which people won’t be held responsible for PFAS contamination on their property and create a number of grant programs to spend the $125 million.
The challenge is that Republicans and industry have different definitions of who counts as responsible for contamination than Democrats and environmental groups. Constructing exemptions to the spills law that are too narrow could result in people being forced to pay for remediation they didn’t cause. But writing the exemptions too broadly could result in polluters passing the cost of remediation on to taxpayers.
Across the state, municipal wastewater treatment utilities sell or give away the byproducts of their plants to use as fertilizer on farm fields. The DNR grants permits to allow the spreading of these byproducts, known as biosolids, which for years was seen as an environmentally responsible source of fertilizer because it was recycled. However biosolids from places with PFAS contamination in the water are contaminated, which can pollute the water near the field where they’re spread.
Wimberger wants to make sure these farmers aren’t on the hook with the DNR to pay for contamination they didn’t know was happening and the DNR gave them a permit to create.
But environmental advocates don’t want the exemptions to be so vague that they’re available to entities such as paper mills or chemical manufacturers.
“We’re just asking you to understand that the way that you word an exemption is going to matter,” Christine Sieger, director of the DNR’s remediation and redevelopment bureau, said in her testimony. “I implement the spill law all day, every day, and I can tell you, people are crafty when it comes to getting out of liability. They will come up with all sorts of ways for how they can get themselves off the hook. And I just, I don’t want you to help them do that. Let’s make sure that they can take care of our people and clean up the mess that they’ve made.”
After the proposed PFAS bill was vetoed by Evers last session, Wimberger complained that opponents raised concerns about the exemptions being too broadly worded without naming specifics. On Tuesday, he said people objected with “platitudes” rather than specific language that could be corrected and that he hoped opponents could be more constructive this time around.
Erik Kanter, director of government relations for Clean Wisconsin, said Tuesday the organization couldn’t support the proposal without amendments, proposing specific line-by-line changes for the bill authors to make.
Kanter pointed to a line in SB 128 that states “a person that spreads biosolids or wastewater residuals contaminated by PFAS in compliance with any applicable license or permit” is exempt from being held responsible for PFAS contamination under the spills law. However, he said, that line is so vaguely worded that an industrial manufacturer could purchase and spread biosolids on its property as a way to gain an exemption from being held responsible for contamination it caused by creating PFAS as a byproduct of manufacturing.
“The Legislature created the PFAS trust fund 29 months ago,” Kanter said. “Marinette, Peshtigo, the Town of Campbell, the town of Stella and communities and individuals throughout the state have waited and waited and waited for state government to create the programs through which the PFAS trust fund can be allocated. They don’t deserve to wait another day. They don’t deserve a bill that doesn’t meet their needs or lets polluters off the hook and saddles taxpayers with the bill. We believe that compromise is possible and essential. We value the bill authors’ partnership to find compromise on this bill. Clean Wisconsin shares their goal in getting a bill to the governor’s desk for his signature this session, and we will continue working in good faith toward that end.”
Both Mursau and Wimberger expressed hope that they could write an amendment that would get enough support to be signed into law.
“It’s my intention to take the feedback here … and bring forward the amendment that can earn the support of the Legislature to be signed into law by the governor,” Mursau said. “I also want to take this opportunity to thank the groups and individuals who have come to us, not just with criticisms, but with constructive ideas. Those who are willing to engage in dialogue, not just opposition, have been instrumental in helping us shape the legislation that can actually pass and deliver results. In a divided government like ours, meaningful progress requires compromise. I’m grateful for those who recognize that and continue to work with us in good faith.”
Republican lawmakers say their bills to address PFAS would offer financial aid and protect innocent landowners from footing the bill for contamination they didn’t cause. But state regulators argue the proposals would still let polluters off the hook.
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A Manitowoc County dairy farmer can’t find an attorney and has no idea where her husband is after he was among 24 people arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in Manitowoc County on Sept. 25.
Wisconsin immigration attorneys said they were surprised to hear that, unlike during other recent federal government shutdowns, immigration court hearings for clients not in ICE detention would continue as planned.
Only about a third of immigrants in Wisconsin with upcoming hearings in federal immigration court have legal representation.
A Manitowoc County dairy worker arrived for her shift early on a Thursday morning in late September and waited for a message from her husband. It’s their routine, she said: rise early, commute to jobs at separate dairies and check in by phone.
“But when I called him, he didn’t answer,” she said in Spanish. “And so I was calling and calling and I said, ‘something happened, because he’s not answering – that’s not normal.’”
Her husband, Abraham Maldonado Almanza, was among the 24 people arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in Manitowoc County on Sept. 25. As far as she knows, officers picked Maldonado Almanza up in the Walmart parking lot where dairy workers gather to carpool hours before sunrise. Within a matter of days, he had — at least from her perspective — effectively vanished, carried away at breakneck speed by the Trump administration’s sweeping immigration crackdown.
The pace of enforcement operations, lack of transparency and sudden shifts in policy have disoriented both those targeted in the crackdown and immigration attorneys already managing overwhelming caseloads.
A Department of Homeland Security press release tied the arrests to a joint operation with the FBI, IRS and other federal law enforcement agencies targeting an alleged human and drug trafficking ring. Neither DHS nor the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Wisconsin responded to inquiries about whether the investigation has resulted in criminal charges against any of those arrested last month, nor did federal district court dockets point to criminal charges resulting from the investigation as of Friday.
Over the following days, the dairy worker says she made her way through a list of immigration attorneys’ phone numbers, none of whom agreed to take her husband’s case. She attributed the reluctance to a preexisting removal order on her husband’s record, which can speed the deportation process. But without a reliable source of information, she was left relying on hearsay to keep track of Abraham’s case.
Dairy workers were among those arrested during a Sept. 25, 2025, federal immigration raid in Manitowoc, Wis. Here, a worker is shown cleaning the milking barn at a farm in Wisconsin on June 11, 2024. (Ben Brewer for Wisconsin Watch)
As the federal government entered a shutdown on Wednesday, several Wisconsin immigration attorneys said they were surprised to hear that, unlike during other shutdowns in recent memory, immigration court hearings for clients not in ICE detention would continue as planned.
Attorneys had not expected the shutdown to slow down the cases of immigrants in detention, but the speed of operations has still caught some off guard. Some of those arrested in Manitowoc County last month were already out of the country days before Congress missed its funding deadline, according to Aissa Olivarez, an attorney with the Community Immigration Law Center in Madison.
“Historically, people are taken to (the Dodge County Jail) and we’re able to at least do an intake and speak with them before anything else happens,” Olivarez said. “But it seems like in this operation, they knew who they were looking for, or exactly what they were going to do. … They did this really, really fast.”
As of Friday, three of the six arrestees named in a DHS press release about the Manitowoc County operation were still in the Dodge County Jail, according to ICE’s detainee locator tool.
Maldonado Almanza was not among them, though his name and photograph appeared in the press release, which also claimed he had a prior conviction for identity theft.
Wisconsin circuit court records yield no matching criminal record, nor do trial court records in Iowa, where his wife says they lived after emigrating from Mexico and before moving to Wisconsin. Iowa court records do, however, reflect that Maldonado Almanza was fined for driving without insurance in 2009.
Some men arrested in Manitowoc County on Sept. 25, 2025, had already left country within days, says Aissa Olivarez, an attorney with the Community Immigration Law Center. She is shown on a commuter train on Oct. 24, 2018 — returning to Madison, Wis., from the Chicago Immigration Court, the designated court for people held in immigration detention in Wisconsin. (Natalie Yahr / Wisconsin Watch)
The dairy worker said her husband had previously received a deportation order in an immigration court case that began while the couple was living in Iowa. That detail matches Olivarez’s understanding of the Manitowoc operation. “It does seem like there were people who have been ordered deported before,” she said. In those cases, “without a quick stay of removal or motion to reopen, the government executes that removal order right away.”
“Because there is such a low capacity (of attorneys) in the state in general, when people already have removal orders, we can’t work fast enough to stop it,” she added.
Maldonado Almanza’s whereabouts remained unclear as of Friday.
Milwaukee immigration attorney John Sesini says his firm took the case of another man picked up in the Manitowoc operation only to discover he had been deported to Mexico within four days of his arrest. The man had no criminal record, Sesini said, and it remains unclear whether he had a prior deportation order. If not, it may still be possible to challenge the deportation in court.
Only about a third of immigrants in Wisconsin with upcoming hearings in federal immigration court have legal representation. Unlike courts operated by the federal judiciary, immigration courts – part of the U.S. Department of Justice – do not provide free representation. Instead, immigrants must pay out of pocket, rely on the few free and low-cost legal services organizations like Olivarez’s legal center or face the courts alone. Those able to find attorneys are vastly more likely to avoid deportation than those who attempt to represent themselves.
For some immigrants facing court dates in the coming weeks, a typical government shutdown could have provided breathing room. In past shutdowns, the DOJ has typically deemed only the cases of immigrants in detention “essential” enough to move forward. The shutdown from late December 2018 to mid-January 2019, for instance, forced the cancellation of at least 80,000 hearings nationwide, according to immigration court records analyzed by the nonprofit Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC).
Attorney Aissa Olivarez works on a commuter train on Oct. 24, 2018, while traveling between Madison, Wis., and the Chicago Immigration Court. (Natalie Yahr / Wisconsin Watch)
A Wisconsin Watch analysis of federal immigration court data suggests that as of August, almost 1,000 immigrants with Wisconsin addresses had hearings scheduled for October. So far, the DOJ has not called off those hearings en masse, though the agency has also not clarified whether immigration courts will continue holding hearings of immigrants who are not detained during a prolonged shutdown.
But in a press release issued on Wednesday, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin underscored that the shutdown will not slow ICE. “The deportations will continue,” she wrote.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
Tens of thousands of people attended the World Dairy Expo in Madison. The annual trade show also includes competitions, which some describe as akin to bovine beauty pageants.
Dairy cows huddle at sunset on a farm in Manitowoc County. Advocates and farmers say an ICE raid that took 24 migrants into custody Sept. 25 poses a threat to the state’s dairy farms and the immigrant workers that keep the industry afloat. (Photo by Andrew Kennard/Wisconsin Examiner)
The morning of Sept. 25, federal agents and immigration authorities swept into Manitowoc to arrest people alleged to be in the country without proper documentation. Agents first went to a Walmart parking lot where dairy workers are known to meet up before driving to the farms where they work. The action then moved on to private residences, where migrants were arrested as they left the house.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security claims the ICE raid in Manitowoc was aimed at dismantling an international sex and drug trafficking ring, but has so far provided little evidence to support that claim. Federal authorities initially said 21 migrants had been arrested in the raid, before later saying 24 had been picked up.
On Tuesday, DHS released the names of six of the 24. Only one individual named in the release has been charged with a sex crime — Jose Hilario Moreno Portillo, who was charged in Manitowoc County court in May with the 2nd degree sexual assault of a child. However, Moreno Portillo has not yet been convicted and court records show he’s been in ICE custody since July.
ICE did not respond to a request for comment on why Moreno Portillo was named as being arrested in the Manitowoc action when he was already in ICE custody.
The five other named individuals have been convicted of identity theft, hit-and-run, disorderly conduct, driving under the influence, possession of narcotic equipment, traffic offenses and a failure to appear charge.
In Wisconsin, immigrants without documentation aren’t able to obtain driver’s licenses, which often causes them to wrack up several criminal traffic offenses when they’re pulled over and ticketed for driving without a license.
With little proof that ICE actually broke up a ring of sex traffickers, immigration advocates and farm groups see the raid as a direct threat to the state’s dairy farms and the immigrant workers that keep the industry afloat.
Farmers and immigrant advocates in Wisconsin have been watching ICE’s actions on dairy farms across the country closely. In March, ICE raided a dairy farm and petting zoo in New York. In April, a raid on a dairy farm in Vermont resulted in eight arrests. And in early June, ICE arrested 11 immigrants in a raid on a dairy farm in New Mexico.
But so far, enforcement against undocumented people on dairy farms had been sporadic and far from the Midwest. In June, President Donald Trump announced and then retreated from guidance that ICE would not aggressively target farms and the hospitality industry.
While last Thursday’s raid in Manitowoc didn’t take place on a dairy farm, most of the individuals arrested were dairy workers. Beyond that, they were dairy workers in the county with the highest concentration of dairy factory farms in the state. Manitowoc County and its northeast Wisconsin neighbors are the epicenter of the modern farming powerhouse that maintains Wisconsin’s status as “America’s Dairyland.”
“It’s just sending an economic ripple effect across the dairy industry, which is Wisconsin’s rural economy,” says Luis Velasquez, statewide organizing director for immigrant advocacy group Voces de la Frontera. “And then also there’s the symbolic and political dimension to it as well. We are America’s Dairyland, and so this enforcement is not just an administrative matter, but it threatens the industry’s well being. Who are we going to be after all of this? Are we still going to be America’s Dairyland?”
Velasquez says the raid sent a “big anxiety wave” through immigrant communities across the state.
“These views have just spiraled out of control in terms of the rumors that have been sent out across the community, rumors of ICE coming into their neighborhoods, to their homes, to their schools,” Velasquez says.
“I have had serious conversations since the raid in Manitowoc of folks who are planning to leave after many years of being here,” he adds. “They just don’t feel like this is a humane lifestyle anymore. They’ve given many years of their lives, and many of them have children here.”
Michael Slattery, a Manitowoc County farmer who grows grain and raises Holstein steers, points to data that shows 70% of the labor on Wisconsin’s dairy farms comes from immigrants and estimates that the dairy industry is the driver of 20% of Manitowoc County’s economy.
Slattery says farmers can’t survive without that migrant labor because no one else is willing to do the work.
“Do you want to get up at 3 a.m. seven days a week to go out in the cold, the heat, to get kicked by cows when you’re putting the suction cups on, to be shat upon, pissed on, pushed around by 1,400 pound cows? People don’t want that,” he says. “I’ve tried to hire part time labor here, I cannot get people, they don’t want to do this sort of stuff.”
Simply expecting farm families to pick up the slack isn’t the answer, he adds. “These dairy farms, they don’t have enough family members that can come out and replace immigrant labor, both documented and undocumented, that are leaving,” Slattery says. “They’re in a money-losing situation now.”
Losing the dairy labor force would have ripple effects across the economy in Wisconsin and the country.
“What do they do in that situation? If your cows cannot be milked, in two, two and a half weeks they’ll go dry,” he says. “The cows get milk fever, get ill, that’s your cheap hamburger in the stores. They’re selling the cows at a loss, that’s what they’ll do. There’s less milk in the market, that will drive up prices for cheese, milk and butter.”
Danielle Endvick, executive director of the Wisconsin Farmers Union, says if Wisconsin’s immigrant workers leave the state — either from being arrested by ICE or leaving on their own to avoid arrest — farms could close and prices could increase.
“Immigration raids and mass deportations can shrink rural economies, are terribly destabilizing for communities and can harm schools, churches, just the fabric of our rural communities too,” Endvick says. “Our rural spaces, our farmers can’t thrive if we’re treating a key workforce like they’re disposable. I think that immigrant workers are essential to Wisconsin dairy, and that when they are threatened, farmers in our rural communities are threatened too.”
Federal agents picked up migrants who were in the parking lot of this Manitowoc Walmart store on Sept. 25. Migrant farm workers in the area have been known to gather at the store before driving to the farms where they work. (Photo by Andrew Kennard/Wisconsin Examiner)